Intuitional Sensitivity
Of course, nothing that's just been said is conclusive. In fact, we've just scratched the surface about the methodological challenges that intuitional diversity raises for our intuition deploying practices.
But, that's okay because, whatever trouble intuitional diversity spells for our intuition deploying practices, diversity is not the real story here. The real story is what intuitional diversity tells us about ourselves, namely, that our philosophical intuitions might be sensitive to things we hadn't anticipated (and in ways that our philosophical theories haven't accounted for). This comes across most clearly when we turn our attention from interpersonal intuitional diversity to intrapersonal intuitional diversity - that is, from intuitional differences between people to intuitional differences within people.One particularly interesting kind of intrapersonal intuitional diversity results from an apparent intuitional sensitivity to the presence or absence of affective content in the description of certain hypothetical cases. We saw an example of this in Chapter 2; recall that Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe (2007) found that people have different intuitions about the relationship between causal determinism and moral responsibility depending on whether or not the hypothetical case they are evaluating has affective content. Of course, this kind of intuitional sensitivity is not limited to metaphysical intuitions. Eric Uhlmann, David Pizarro, David Tannenbaum, and Peter Ditto (2009) recently found that some moral intuitions also show sensitivity to affectively charged content.10 In one study, Uhlmann and his colleagues asked people to consider two versions of Judith Jarvis Thomson's (1985) Fat Man case:
Fat Man
Consider a case - which I shall call Fat Man - in which you are standing on a footbridge over the trolley track.
You can see a trolley hurtling down the track, out of control. You turn around to see where the trolley is headed, and there are five workmen on the track where it exits from under the footbridge. What to do? Being an expert on trolleys, you know of one certain way to stop an out-of-control trolley: Drop a really heavy weight in its path. But where to find one? It just so happens that standing next to you on the footbridge is a fat man, a really fat man. He is leaning over the railing, watching the trolley; all you have to do is give him a little shove, and over the railing he will go, onto the track in the path of the trolley. Would it be permissible for you to do this?Some people were asked to consider a version of this case in which an agent could choose to sacrifice an individual named “Chip Ellsworth III” to save 100 members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra, while other people were asked to consider a version of the case in which the agent could choose to sacrifice an individual named “Tyrone Payton” to save 100 members of the New York Philharmonic. Remarkably, people (especially people who identified themselves as politically liberal) were more likely to think that it is morally permissible to sacrifice Chip Ellsworth III than they were to think that it is morally permissible to sacrifice Tyrone Payton.11 One explanation for this asymmetrical result is that people who identify themselves as politically liberal tend to demonstrate a significant aversion to adopting attitudes that might be considered prejudiced (Plant & Devine 1998, Monin & Miller 2001, Norton et al. 2004). This aversion to even the appearance of prejudice, when combined with the different racial undertones of the two cases, causes people (especially people who identify themselves as politically liberal) to have different emotional responses to the two cases - emotional responses that, in turn, trigger different moral intuitions.12
We have seen that philosophical intuitions are sensitive to cultural background, gender, and the presence or absence of affective content in the description of the hypothetical case.
Recently, Stacey Swain, Joshua Alexander, and Jonathan Weinberg (2008) found yet another form of intuitional sensitivity: sensitivity to the context in which the hypothetical case is being considered. In particular, they found that subjects have different epistemic intuitions depending on whether, and which, other hypothetical cases are considered first. Consider, for example, the following version of Keith Lehrer's Truetemp case:Truetemp
One day Charles was knocked out by a falling rock; as a result his brain was “rewired” so that he is always right whenever he estimates the temperature where he is. Charles is unaware that his brain has been altered in this way. A few weeks later, this brain rewiring leads him to believe that it is 71 degrees in his room. Apart from his estimation, he has no other reasons to think that it is 71 degrees. In fact, it is 71 degrees.
Some people were asked to consider the Truetemp case before evaluating any other hypothetical case. Others were asked to evaluate the Truetemp case after considering a clear case of knowledge:
Karen is a distinguished professor of chemistry. This morning, she read in an article in a leading scientific journal that mixing two common floor disinfectants, Cleano Plus and Washaway, will create a poisonous gas that is deadly to humans. In fact, the article is correct: mixing the two products does create a poisonous gas. At noon, Karen sees a janitor mixing Cleano Plus and Washaway and yells to him, “Get away! Mixing those two products creates a poisonous gas!”
And, still others were asked to evaluate the Truetemp case after being asked to evaluate a clear case of non-knowledge:
Dave likes to play a game with flipping a coin. He sometimes gets a “special feeling” that the next flip will come out heads. When he gets this “special feeling”, he is right about half the time, and wrong about half the time.
Just before the next flip, Dave gets that “special feeling”, and the feeling leads him to believe that the coin will land heads. He flips the coin, and it does land heads.We found that, when compared with people who were asked to evaluate the Truetemp case before evaluating any other cases, people who were asked to evaluate the Truetemp case after first being asked to evaluate a clear case of knowledge were less willing to attribute knowledge in the Truetemp case, and people who were asked to evaluate the Truetemp case after first being asked to evaluate a clear case of non-knowledge were more willing to attribute knowledge in the Truetemp case.13 This suggests that Truetemp intuitions are being influenced by the context in which the hypothetical case is being considered.
Psychologists have been aware of this kind of intuitional sensitivity for some time. In an earlier study, Lewis Petrinovich and Patricia O’Neill (1996) found that some of our moral intuitions also show sensitivity to order and context. They had people consider three versions of the Trolley case.14 The first version was as follows:
Switch
A trolley is hurtling down the tracks. There are five innocent people on the track ahead of the trolley, and they will be killed if the trolley continues going straight ahead. There is a spur of track leading off to the side. There is one innocent person on that spur of track. The brakes of the trolley have failed and there is a switch that can be activated to cause the trolley to go to the side track. You are an innocent bystander (that is, not an employee of the railroad, etc.). You can throw the switch, saving five innocent people, which will result in the death of the one innocent person on the side track. What would you do?
The second and third versions differed only in the placement of the innocent person and the action that would be required to save the five track workers.
In the second version - let’s call this the Button case - the innocent person is on a bridge above the tracks and the action required in order to save the track workers involves pushing a button that would cause a ramp to go underneath the trolley causing, in turn, the trolley to jump the tracks onto the bridge, killing the innocent person but saving the five track workers. In the third version - let’s call this the Push case - the innocent person is on a bridge with you and the action required in order to save the track workers involves pushing the innocent person onto the tracks into the path of the trolley. Petrinovich and O'Neill asked some people to consider these cases in the order just presented (Switch - Button - Push) and others to consider these cases in the reverse order (Push - Button - Switch). They found that people were more willing to act to save the five track workers in both the Switch case and the Push case when those cases appeared first in the sequence than when they appeared last in the sequence,15 and that people were more willing to act to save the five track workers in the Button case when that case followed the Switch case than when it followed the Push case.16 This suggests that our intuitions about these cases, like our intuitions about the Truetemp case, are sensitive to the context in which those cases are being considered.17Philosophical intuitions, it turns out, are sensitive to a host of things we hadn't expected them to be sensitive to (to facts about who is considering the relevant hypothetical case, the presence or absence of certain kinds of content, and the context in which the hypothetical case is being considered) and this sensitivity produces both interpersonal and intrapersonal intuitional diversity. As we will see, intuitional sensitivity - particularly, unanticipated and unwelcome intuitional sensitivity - presents a different kind of challenge to our intuition deploying practices and the future success of those practices will depend on our ability to come to better understand and accommodate these forms of intuitional sensitivity.
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